Astronomers discover strange new type of star hidden in the centre of our galaxy
CTV
A decade-long survey of the night sky has revealed a mysterious new type of star astronomers are referring to as an "old smoker."
A decade-long survey of the night sky has revealed a mysterious new type of star astronomers are referring to as an "old smoker."
These previously hidden stellar objects are aging, giant stars located near the heart of the Milky Way galaxy. The stars are inactive for decades and fade until they're almost invisible before belching out clouds of smoke and dust, and astronomers think they could play a role in distributing elements across the universe.
Four studies detailing the observations published January 25 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Astronomers observed the old smoker stars for the first time during the survey that involved monitoring nearly a billion stars in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye.
The observations were carried out with the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope, situated at a vantage point high in the Chilean Andes at the Cerro Paranal Observatory.
The team's initial goal was searching for newborn stars, which are hard to detect in visible light because they are obscured by dust and gas in the Milky Way. But infrared light can pierce through the galaxy's high concentrations of dust to pick out otherwise hidden or faint objects.
While two-thirds of the stars were easy to classify, the remainder were more difficult, so the team used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to study individual stars, said Philip Lucas, professor of astrophysics at the University of Hertfordshire. Lucas was the lead author of one study and a coauthor on the other three.
